Friday, October 08, 2021
CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY IS BULLSHIT
Why corporate social responsibility is BS
While big corporations tell Americans how virtuous they are, they lobby up a storm against Biden’s social policy bill
Last modified on Mon 27 Sep 2021 09.46 EDT
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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"In recent years, “corporate social responsibility” has been viewed by some as the answer to the multiple failings of capitalism. Chief executives have responded to all sorts of problems – worsening climate change, widening inequality, soaring healthcare costs and so on – by promising their corporations will lead the way to solutions because they’re committed to being “socially responsible”.
Ninety-eight percent of this is rubbish. CEOs won’t do anything that hurts their bottom lines. They’re in the business of making as much money as possible, not solving social problems.
In fact, real social change would prevent them from doing many of the hugely profitable things they now do. Which means they won’t change their ways unless they’re required by law to change (and even then, only when the penalty times the probability of getting caught is higher than the profits from continuing anyway). Their soothing promises of social responsibility are intended to forestall such laws.
I’ve seen this repeatedly. When I was secretary of labor, big corporations would violate laws on worker safety, wages and hours and pensions, whenever doing so was cheaper than obeying the laws. And they’d fight like hell against such laws to begin with – all the while telling the public what wonderful citizens they were.
You may recall that in August 2019, the Business Roundtable – one of Washington’s most prestigious corporate groups, on whose board sit the CEOs of Apple, Walmart and JPMorgan – issued a widely publicized statement expressing “a fundamental commitment” to the wellbeing of “all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original), including their employees, communities and the environment.
The statement was widely hailed as marking a new era of corporate social responsibility.
Since then, the Roundtable and its members have issued a continuous stream of jejune statements about their dedication to such things as providing childcare, pre-K and affordable healthcare, promoting community college and workforce training, alleviating poverty and reversing climate change.
It turns out these are exactly the priorities in Joe Biden’s $3.5tn reconciliation bill.
But guess what? The Business Roundtable isn’t lobbying for the bill. It’s lobbying intensely against it.
> Jessica Boulanger, a spokeswoman, told the Washington Post the Roundtable is engaged in “a significant, multifaceted campaign” to stop tax increases that would finance the bill, and will “continue to ramp up our efforts in the coming weeks”. The group is launching a seven-figure digital advertising campaign to oppose the bill.
Hypocrisy? Only if you believed the Roundtable BS about corporate social responsibility. If you know the truth – that corporations will do whatever they can to maximize their profits and share values, social responsibility be damned – there’s nothing surprising here.
Why didn’t business groups fight the president’s infrastructure bill? Because government spending on infrastructure helps their bottom lines by lowering their costs of procuring supplies and getting goods to market. Social responsibility had nothing to do with it.
It’s tempting to chalk all this up to “corporate greed”. But that makes sense only if you think corporations are capable of emotions, such as greed. They’re not. Corporations aren’t people, no matter what the supreme court says. They’re bundles of contracts.
> The specific people who enter those contracts (on behalf of big corporations as well as thousands of people who run vast investment funds on behalf of millions of shareholders) are neither greedy nor socially responsible. They’re merely doing what they understand to be their jobs . . .
Corporate spokespeople like Boulanger of the Business Roundtable – along with platoons of corporate lobbyists and influence peddlers, corporate lawyers and hired-gun economists, corporate political operatives and PR flaks – together form in effect a fourth branch of government, wielding huge and increasing power. About one out of every four people now working in downtown Washington fills one of these roles. . ."
READ MORE > Robert Reich. the Guardian
IN FULL VIEW: FAR-RIGHT ALTERNATIVE REALITY TALKING HEADS / PEDDLERS OF MIS-INFORMATION
Instead of testifying to Congress, Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan went on a right-wing podcast
Oltmann gained notoriety for a baseless allegation he previously made against a Dominion Voting Systems executive that the company’s ballot-counting machines were rigged to ensure Trump lost the election. That executive, Eric Coomer, has filed several defamation lawsuits over Oltmann’s unfounded claims that he was a member of “antifa” and conspired to change election results.
Both Oltmann and Logan also appeared in the conspiracy theory film “The Deep Rig” which was riddled with falsehoods about the 2020 election and was directed by a man whose previous work claimed aliens were behind 9/11.
Logan was heavily involved in efforts to overturn election results in Michigan and he provided information to U.S. senators that they could ostensibly use to reject presidential electors from battleground states that Biden won. And he spread election disinformation on social media in the weeks after the election. In that conspiracy theory film, which was produced by the primary funder of the “audit,” Logan declared that the Central Intelligence Agency was behind claims that the 2020 election was fair.
‘I can’t tell you if this is fraud’
The two-hour discussion, titled “Cyberninja’s (sic) CEO Tells Congress to Fork Off and Joins US Instead,” focused on a range of topics, including Logan’s faith, the audit, a fake version of the audit report and calls from right-wing extremists to decertify the election because of what the “audit” concluded.
Logan spoke openly about witnessing what he called “anomalies” after the 2020 election that he claimed the “mainstream media” was not covering, saying that this is what got him into “election integrity work.”
“It didn’t make logical sense,” Logan said of the “anomalies” of the 2020 election.
> Prior to being hired by the Arizona Senate to conduct the ballot review of the Maricopa County election, Arizona Mirror discovered Logan had been an advocate for “Stop the Steal” content on his now defunct Twitter account, retweeting known misinformation peddlers such as Ron Watkins and Bobby Piton.
Logan has repeatedly refused to answer questions from the Mirror and other journalists about his Twitter account or his advocacy of lies about the election.
But he told the podcast that, by Nov. 14, 2020, he was meeting with a group of people to work on “election anomalies” in South Carolina. This confirms earlier reporting by Talking Points Memo in which conspiracy theorist Lin Wood said Logan was at his property in South Carolina to discuss election fraud investigations. Wood’s organization, Fight Back, donated $50,000 to the Arizona “audit” efforts.
Lin Wood says that the planes that hit the twin towers and the Pentagon on 9/11 were fake CGI. pic.twitter.com/H8amh8luzp
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) October 2, 2021
After that, Logan said he didn’t come home until Christmas Eve and worked on election fraud investigations in Georgia. Logan was also involved in the failed attempt to prove election fraud in Antrim County, Mich., where he was listed as an expert witness.
> When the conversation turned to the findings that the “audit” made about the Maricopa County election, Logan claimed that there were over 23,000 “suspicious ballots,” but demurred on the question of whether there was any fraud.
“I can’t tell you if this is fraud or if it is not fraud. What I can tell you is that it is highly suspicious,” Logan said of the audit report’s assessment of mail in ballots. . .
> A large portion of the discussion centered on the concept of decertifying the 2020 election, something Logan was not keen on.
“Suggesting we should decertify is like launching a nuke,” Logan said, drawing criticism from the hosts.
. . .“Are you ready for the left or other people to use the same burden of proof to use it against you?” Logan said to Oltmann, adding that they must have “absolute proof” and that they are not there yet for decertification, something legislative attorneys have said is not possible.
Logan pushed for Oltmann and his viewers to wait for Attorney General Mark Brnovich to investigate, and said that the Arizona Senate is in the process of sending more information to the AG.
“Let’s pray for the AG, let’s pray that he does what is right,” Logan said. “Send him letters, send him emails, encourage him to do what is right.”
Oltmann, who has a history of using violent rhetoric, had some different thoughts on the matter.
“The backlash from the American people if (Brnovich) doesn’t do the right thing is going to be a snowball, that I’m not sure rolling down that mountain will not turn into something that none of us want, and that is some sort of kinetic behavior by Americans saying enough is enough,” Oltmann said, adding that it may result in “tar and feathering.”
Reference: Arizona Mirror
BRAVO! Financial Support for Freedom of The Press
From Mike Masnick yesterday writing online in Techdirt
Filecoin Foundation Ensuring That SecureDrop Can Continue To Help Whistleblowers And Journalists
from the some-good-news dept
Earlier this year we were excited to see the Filecoin Foundation give the Internet Archive its largest donation ever, to help make sure that the Internet Archive is both more sustainable as an organization, and that the works it makes available will be more permanently available on a more distributed, decentralized system. The Internet Archive is a perfect example of the type of organization that can benefit from a more distributed internet.
Another such organization is the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which, among its many, many projects, maintains and develops SecureDrop, the incredibly important tool for journalists and whistleblowers, which was initially developed in part by Aaron Swartz (as DeadDrop). So it's great to see that the Freedom of the Press Foundation has now announced the largest donation it has ever received, coming from the Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web (the sister organization of the Filecoin Foundation):
Today, for the first time, that calculus has changed. We’re thrilled to announce the largest grant in the history of Freedom of the Press Foundation that will ensure SecureDrop survives — and thrives — for years to come. The Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web — a new grantmaking organization whose mission is to permanently preserve humanity’s most important information — is funding FPF at over $1.7 million for each of the next three years, for a total of $5.8 million.
The funding will largely go towards sustaining and expanding our SecureDrop team, funding the development of the next-generation of the system, including exploring a new zero-trust architecture for the decentralized servers. This grant will ensure that SecureDrop will not only be sustainable over the long term, but will be easier to use and hopefully safer than ever. In short, it will have a game-changing impact on how we can build and improve SecureDrop for journalists around the world. You can read about some of our technical plans for the future here.
This is great to see as SecureDrop is another one of those tools that is so key, but as an open source project is often in a precarious position without the financial support to make sure that there is active development.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, decentralization, filecoin, free speech, journalism, securedrop, whistleblowers
Companies: filecoin foundation, freedom of the press foundation
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